The Silent Places (20 page)

“What kind of scope was it?”

“A Mauser.”

“You should have held on to it,” Reese said. “It was worth more than a television.” He put a box of rounds in his coat pocket. Then he took a wad of notes from his pants. He counted out a sum and put it on the table.

Reese said, “That’s a thousand dollars.”

“It’s worth more than that.”

“It’s what you’re getting,” Reese said. “I’m going to leave you down here. You’ll be able to get out, but I wouldn’t advise trying it too soon. Now listen to me: I’m giving you money for your rifle and I could have easily killed you. You come after me, I
will
kill you. Trust me, I’ve done it before.”

Kolonel Tom said, “You’re a thief. Worse than that, a federal thief. Paying me with taxpayers’ money.”

“Yeah, whatever. Now you remember what we talked about.”

Reese took the man’s eyeglasses from his coat pocket and set them on the table. “Here are your glasses.”

Then Reese went up the steps, keeping an eye on the nut job. When he got out, he closed the door behind him. Reese looked around the barn to see if there was an object he could place on top of the cellar door. His eyes came to rest on a bale of hay. But he decided it would be too heavy and the nut wouldn’t be able to get out at all and he would suffocate amid his Nazi treasures.

Reese backed out of the barn, training the Enfield on the door. If the man came out, he would kill him. He wouldn’t wait to see if he was armed. Shoot between the space on his glasses.

He put fifty yards between himself and the barn, then a hundred. Soon he was at his Mercury, which he had parked out of sight of the house. He got in it, started it, and left.

He felt better when he was a few miles down the road. Good enough that he could laugh about Kolonel Tom. He’d known guys like that in boot camp. Hate-filled Gomer Pyles who couldn’t adjust to civilian life but needed to identify with something. Some of the recruits in boot camp were already men, their personalities already formed. Some of them were borderline retarded. And then there were a few assorted mental cases, some of whom were salvageable. The military might have been able to save Kolonel Tom, Reese thought. He had known a handful of hard-core racists who, through military training, overcame their prejudices for the sake of becoming good soldiers, who learned to think not so much in terms of black and white but more in terms of military and civilian, enemy and friend. The military was one of the few successful government social programs in that respect.

Reese had been sent to the army by a judge. Once there, he adjusted and he accepted. He made a decision not to look back. A year after finishing boot camp, he volunteered for the army Rangers. He completed the training and attended all the schools, including SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape). Most of the SERE training was done in the mountains of northern Georgia, near Fort Benning. During one of the training exercises, he crossed paths with a particularly vicious marine, who had been assigned the role of enemy pursuer. Reese at that time was a mere corporal, training with two other noncommissioned officers of higher rank and a navy ensign. The ensign fell apart early and Reese took de facto command. The ensign was ultimately caught and beaten by the overly zealous marine. The next day, Reese told the others to move on. He hung back, found a tree that he liked, climbed up it, and waited. Eventually, the marine came along and Reese fell on him.

The marine fought back, treating it like regular combat, and got his arm broken for his trouble. Reese seized his weapon and took his pursuer captive. Reese was later promoted to top sergeant.

In 1983, he parachuted into Grenada with other army Rangers. It was a short-lived military action with few casualties. But Reese distinguished himself in combat. He was approached by the CIA a month later. He was interviewed and tested. They found he had an affinity for learning languages. That he was proficient with small arms, particularly grenades and submachine guns. That he was quiet and modest in appearance. That he was a natural soldier. That he was a loner, with no close friends or long-term girlfriends. That he was intelligent and a natural problem solver. That he was not psychotic but still had a rational, cold-eyed view of human nature. Eventually, they asked him if he would be interested in becoming part of what they called the “intelligence community.”

As part of his suitability check, he was interviewed by a series of psychologists to see if he was mentally stable. During one of the interviews, the subject of how he joined the army arose. Reese told the story without emotion.

The psychologist said, “Before the fight with the other boy, had you had some sort of training in self-defense? Martial arts, anything like that?”

“No.”

“Then how did you know what to do?”

“I just knew.”

“No one taught you?”

Reese said, “I don’t think you teach someone to do that.”

“Do you think you’re a violent man?”

“No.”

“Do you feel anger at your father?”

“I don’t know my father.”

He was recruited and trained. The next ten years saw him in El Salvador, Angola, London, Beirut, Beijing, and Berlin. In time, he spoke French, German, Spanish, and Arabic with a natural ease. He was less adept with Chinese and Japanese, but knew enough to get by. Working with the French intelligence agency, he was instrumental in tracking down the planner of two airline hijackings. Thereafter, the planner was shot and killed outside his hideout in the Lebanese mountains. The planner’s associates believed the killing was done with a rifle and the shooter was at least eight hundred yards away.

At this time, Reese was what the intelligence community called a “blue badger”—that is, someone working directly for the CIA.

It was sometime after the hijack planner was killed that Reese informed his superiors he was more interested in gathering intelligence than he was in being an assassin. The CIA chiefs did not interpret this as a sign of weakness, but, rather, as a sign that Reese wanted to be in management, as opposed to labor. They acceded to his wishes and he became active in E&E (escape and evasion) work. During the last few years of the Cold War, Reese was instrumental in bringing burned-out, or “blown,” agents out of the Soviet Union or China. Like David Chang, most of the agents understood that they owed their lives to Reese and his team. Some were grateful to him, others not so much.

Reese’s last E&E job had been in East Germany. He was trying to sneak a scientist across the border when they were ambushed by Stasi agents. There was a fire fight. Reese and his people managed to escape, but not before Reese took a bullet in his back.

The surgery was performed in Frankfurt and he was evacuated to a hospital in London for recuperation. Doctors told him that the bullet had narrowly missed his spine and he was lucky that he would be walking again.

It was in the hospital in London that he met and fell in love with a nurse.

Her name was Sara Jennings. She was fair-skinned and brown-haired and she had a funny-looking, beautiful mouth. She was only a few years younger than Reese (he was in his early thirties then), but she talked to him as if he were an older man, her tone patronizing and warm. “How’s our Mr. Reese this morning?”

She seemed to sense that he was depressed by what could be a long, painful recovery. He would walk again, but not without enduring strenuous physical therapy. Sara Jennings also sensed that for all his machismo, he was perhaps lonely and vulnerable.

Reese flirted with her, but soon he saw that she would be no quick, easy seduction. During his second week, she came into his hospital room and caught him watching a British ballroom dance show on television. He was captivated by it.

“Are you enjoying this?”

“I am,” Reese said. “We have nothing like this in the States. They do this every week?”

“Yes,” she said. “Have you not been in England before?”

“I live here on and off,” he said. “But I’ve never had time to watch your television shows.”

“Would you prefer
Dynasty
?”

He was struck by this. This cute English girl referencing American pop culture in her English voice. Teasing him. Taking the piss, as the British say.

“No. I like this better.”

Eventually, she took to visiting him in his room before she went home. Sometimes she would sit by his bed with her coat over her uniform, signaling she wouldn’t be staying long, guarding herself. They learned small things about each other. She was from Islington and her father had been a soldier who had helped evacuate Dunkirk in a fishing boat when the Germans were coming over the hill. Hehad returned to France on D-day. She asked Reese if he was a soldier, too.

No, he told her. He was a businessman.

She smiled at him then and he knew that she knew he was lying.

She said, “You were shot.”

Reese shrugged and changed the subject.

A few days later, she said, “You are a soldier, aren’t you?”

“Sort of,” Reese said.

“Have you got a wife, children?”

“No.”

“What, then? Just short-term affairs, a sad steady series of trollops?”

Yes, there had been women. Some of them prostitutes. In Berlin and Hamburg and Hong Kong. He was not ashamed of any of it. Still, he did not discuss this with her. Before he had met her, he had presumed that he preferred the short term. He also presumed that she would tease him again about his bachelorhood.

But what she did was look at him plainly and say, “There’s a void in you, isn’t there? A sadness.”

Reese smiled at her. “I think you’re imagining things,” he said.

“No.”

“And what about you?”

The nurse said, “That’s none of your business.”

Within a couple of weeks, he became accustomed to tea at four o’clock. She would sit with him while he drank his tea and ate the buttered toast she brought him. She would chat with him about seemingly mundane subjects, which he enjoyed very much. He had never known pleasant domesticity.

He would eventually say to her, “I think the English are the happiest people I know.”

“You don’t know many English,” she said.

“I’ve worked with some.”

“Made any friends?”

He didn’t answer her.

And she said, “We’re very different. You Americans love success. We wallow in failures. We love our flops.”

“Like Eddie Eagle?”

“Exactly,” she said. “You’re always looking for something better, something more. Have you worked with British soldiers?”

A moment passed. She’s smart, Reese thought. He said, “Yes.”

“Have you ever heard a British enlisted man apologize for his rank?”

Very smart.

“No,” Reese said.

“Do you miss America?”

“…I don’t know. Sometimes, I guess. What are we talking about here?”

“We’re having tea, that’s all.”

An agent from the Tokyo station had once told Reese that the perfect setup was to have a Japanese wife, an American salary, an English garden, and a Chinese cook. The worst combination: Japanese garden, Chinese salary, English cook, American wife. Something like that. He had not resided in the United States for any length of time after being recruited by the Agency. Accordingly, the notion of marrying an American woman had not really been an issue. Indeed, he had never given serious thought to marriage at all.

Until he met Sara Jennings. Like Miles Copeland, another American CIA operative, he was falling in love with an Englishwoman. And, in the process, he was becoming an Anglophile. Teatime, soccer, television shows about ballroom dancing, and so forth. He was becoming attached to these things, attached to this culture.

He was an American and he did not suffer from any identity issues. Circumstances had forced him to become a soldier. In time, he came to realize that he was good at soldiering and relieved to be out of what would have been a dead-end life in Texas. No one had forced him to join the Agency. He had been recruited and he saw it as an opportunity to do more interesting work. He still believed he was working for his country.

An attachment to an Englishwoman would complicate his life as well as his career. Perhaps even complicate his identity.

Shortly before his release from the hospital, he made a decision. He would ask the woman to go on a weekend trip with him. If she refused, that would be the end of it. If she agreed, he would take her away for a couple of days and get her out of his system.

He asked and she agreed.

Reese rented a car and together they drove to the English West Country. They stayed in a bed-and-breakfast that did not have an elevator. Climbing the stairs, Reese realized he was still weakened by his injuries and had to stop. Sara took the luggage from his hand and assisted him the rest of the way.

They had dinner at the inn and then got drunk at the local pub. Reese had never had so much fun in a bar before. He joked with Sara and talked with the locals. He had intended to maul her once he got to the room, but once there, he didn’t have the strength to try. He fell on the bed with his clothes still on. He remembered seeing her come out of the bathroom in a robe. She climbed in with him and then he was asleep.

The next morning, they made love. Tentatively at first, but then enthusiastically. After, she said, “Better?” And he laughed.

It was at breakfast that she told him she knew what he was up to.

There weren’t many other people in the dining room. It was an old-fashioned place, with small tables and black-and-white pictures on the wall of Brits walking amid rubble caused by German planes, the British people unfazed.

There was contemporary music on the radio, coming from the kitchen. Tears for Fears singing “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

Reese sat with the woman, comfortable being quiet with her.

Sara was looking at her menu when she said, “So when were you planning to do it?”

“Do what?” Reese said.

“Give me the piss-off.”

“Excuse me?”

“The brush, as you Americans say. When are you going to say good-bye?” Her soft brown eyes lifted from the menu and rested on him.